true for someone. To me it seems that the need is synthetic, that some
synthetic idea and belief is needed to harmonize one's life, to give a
law by which motive may be tried against motive and an effectual peace
of mind achieved. I want an active peace and not a quiescence, and I do
not want to suppress and expel any motive at all. But to many people the
effort takes the form of attempts to cut off some part of oneself as it
were, to repudiate altogether some straining or distressing or
disappointing factor in the scheme of motives, and find a tranquillizing
refuge in the residuum. So we have men and women abandoning their share
in economic development, crushing the impulses and evading the
complications that arise out of sex and flying to devotions and simple
duties in nunneries and monasteries; we have people cutting their lives
down to a vegetarian dietary and scientific research, resorting to
excesses of self-discipline, giving themselves up wholly to some "art"
and making everything else subordinate to that, or, going in another
direction, abandoning pride and love in favour of an acquired appetite
for drugs or drink.

Now it seems to me that this desire to get the confused complex of life
simplified is essentially what has been called the religious motive, and
that the manner in which a man achieves that simplification, if he does
achieve it, and imposes an order upon his life, is his religion. I find
in the scheme of conversion and salvation as it is presented by many
Christian sects, a very exact statement of the mental processes I am
trying to express. In these systems this discontent with the complexity
of life upon which religion is based, is called the conviction of sin,
and it is the first phase in the process of conversion--of finding
salvation. It leads through distress and confusion to illumination, to
the act of faith and peace.